"Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012" eBook (Think Story based approach to presenting "Testing for Continuous Delivery")

Microsoft Downloads - Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012

Testing is potentially an obstacle to agile software deployment. The smallest change in your code could require the whole application to be retested. This book shows you how to minimize these costs by using the testing infrastructure of Visual Studio 2012. The code samples gives you a starting point to test your infrastructure.

Version:1.0
Date published:10/26/2012

Language:English

TestingforContinuousDeliverywithVisualStudio2012.pdf, 14.2 MB
TIG.EXE, 1.7 MB

This book is aimed at test engineers, managers, developers, and folks interested in understanding the changing world of test. Over the last several years, software testing has changed a great deal. In the past, test plans were on paper, filed away and out of sight. Today they are—or can be with Visual Studio—living documents, as manual and automated tests are integrating into the test workflow supported by the test infrastructure.

Today you no longer have to set up physical boxes; instead you can set up and automate virtual environments composed of virtual machines to meet your testing environment needs. With Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, the pain of dealing with a heterogeneous test infrastructure is reduced, the cost and effectiveness of testing a product is improved, and regression testing becomes cost effective instead of a nightmare.

Knowing how to test is important, but understanding how this new infrastructure is changing the business of testing and software delivery is critical. Today's businesses require nimble teams that can support continuous delivery and deal with updates and bugs in an agile fashion. It's what your customers have come to expect.

In this guide, we follow a team as they move from a conventional approach to testing towards one more suited to the needs of present-day development. We see how they address the costs and the pain of their old methods by adopting the testing infrastructure of Visual Studio 2012.

From the Forward:

This book tells the story of two companies, Contoso and Fabrikam. Over my thirty years in the software industry, I’ve seen lots of companies that work like Contoso. Fortunately, over the last decade, I’ve also seen more and more like Fabrikam.

There never has been a better time for software. We can now produce a better flow of value for our customers, with less waste and more transparency than we ever could before. This revolution has been driven largely from the bottom, by small, agile, fast-moving development teams at places like Fabrikam. It’s a global revolution, visible in places as unlike one another as Silicon Valley, Estonia, China, Brazil, and India.

Those of us in mature economies need to keep pace. Our supply chains are morphing into supply ecosystems. Software is no longer about designing everything to build; it’s about finding parts to reuse and rapidly experimenting with innovation—the one thing you can’t reuse or outsource. Every time you pick up your smartphone, you experience the benefits of this cycle.

Software testing needs to keep pace too. In the days of Contoso, we thought about minimizing “scrap and rework.” Now at Fabrikam, we think of rapid experimentation and a continuous cycle of buildmeasurelearn. Testers are no longer the guys who catch stuff over the wall, but are full members of a multidisciplinary, self-organizing team. While their role at Contoso was defensive—do no harm to the customer, at Fabrikam it is offensive—anticipate the customer’s behavior and wishes and be the first and best advocates.

Welcome to testing at Fabrikam. It’s a lot more hectic around here, but it’s also a lot more fun and rewarding

(via News from the South Africa Developer and Platform Group - Visual Studio Update 1 Videos and Testing for Continuous Delivery Book)

 

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"Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012 RC" Free eBook (PDF) and code samples from Microsoft Patterns & Practices